2018 Poison is wacky and often boring, but the divide between the movie's standard superhero-and-fight script and the “What would happen if I went into the lobster tank?” by Tom Hardy? The improvisations in the two main roles of reporter Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote give the final product an undeniable appeal. PoisonDespite itself, it's strange and fun in a way that very few superhero movies ever are.
Unfortunately, the sequel, from 2021. Venom: Let there be slaughterdismisses the tension between impulsive acting and by-the-book plotting, and leans toward Hardy's performance as comedy, with mixed results. And now the supposedly final installment (at least that's what the title says, Poison: The last dancesuggests) unhinges his toothy alien jaw and attempts to inhale a raunchy Eddie/symbiote comedy road trip and a totally serious, high-stakes sci-fi action movie at the same time.
Returning to the events of Venom: Let there be slaughter (as well as a credits scene from Spider-Man: No Way Home), the last dance begins with Eddie (Hardy) and the Venom symbiote (also Hardy) on vacation in Mexico, where they discover they are wanted for the murder of Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham). Mulligan was apparently killed in the last film by Carnage's fiancée Shriek, but survived thanks to symbiote synthesis. Eddie and the symbiote decide to go to New York because Eddie, who is still an investigative journalist with considerable accomplishments under his belt, last dance doesn't do much to remind viewers about that: he remembers that he has dirt on a judge there and can use it as blackmail to clear his name. Yeah, sure, totally, I guess.
Soon after, they realize that they are being pursued by even more powerful forces. As an opening montage and some story dumps explain, Knull (Andy Serkis), the god of symbiotes and the void who looks like the lead guitarist in a goth band, wants Eddie and the symbiote's “codex.” That's a bit metaphysical that they possess because, essentially, their host-symbiont bond is exceptionally strong. Knull needs the codex to unlock his space prison so he can destroy all life in the universe, so he sent a group of hunter-killer monsters to Earth to get them.
This Knull stuff seems to have come out of nowhere in this series, and that's because it's Marvel Comics continuity hot off the presses, published basically at the same time as 2018. Poison was coming to theaters. last dance highlights Knull's character design and backstory, as well as the concept of codices and the idea that the symbiote's homeworld is a prison, from the work of writer Donny Cates and artist Ryan Stegman, who created Knull as the main antagonist of his popular 2018 race. in Poisonwhich culminated with the king in black crossover event.
resistant and last dance Director and co-writer Kelly Marcel even uses lines from the reveal theme of Knull's origin story as mic-drop moments, when a character impressively whistles: “The darkness has teeth.” Which would be a lot funnier if Cates and Stegman hadn't been ignorant about adapting their work for last dance — they found out from a trailer. It seems like they're taking it slow, but it's far from a good look for Sony and Marvel Entertainment.
Anyway: God of the symbiotes. You need the Venom codex. CG monster hunters from space. (Xenophages, a monster borrowed from Larry Hama's 1996 film). Poison: the hunted.) Do you have all that? Because we haven't even met the rest of the expansive human cast of last danceThey come equipped with their own stories, goals, and personality quirks. Juno Temple plays a symbiote scientist with a sad childhood. She argues with Chiwetel's xenophobic general Ejiofor, who wants to shut down her research and eliminate her numerous captured alien symbiotes. Rhys Ifans plays an elderly, anachronistic hippie dad whose lifelong dream is to meet an alien.
The idea of expanding the distribution to last dance including interests outside of Venom's is quite noble. Much ink has been spilled about how Sam Raimi's dedication to including the “little people” of New York City as protagonists of his Spider-Man trilogy gave those films a vital humanizing tone. Modern interconnected superhero movies typically only have time for superheroes (or characters who will become superheroes in future installments of the franchise), and that's almost always to the detriment of those movies.
But Venom: The Last Dance It's so buried under its moving parts that it can't do any of them justice, despite Marcel's efforts. (She's making her directorial debut here, after working as a screenwriter on the previous Venom films and 50 shades of gray.) the last dance doesn't exactly oscillate between the not-so-good and very-bad road trip of Venom and the rest of the characters: it jumps across its tracks like a runaway train, going straight from a serious moment of a woman contemplating prolonged childhood grief to a dance interlude set to “Dancing Queen” by ABBA. It's like Eddie and Venom are in The Hangoverbut all the others are in the most serious parts of Independence Day.
Image: Sony Photos
the original Poison found success in the mess of Hardy's brave performance fighting against such mundane risks as Eddie interacting with his ex and her aggressively normal new boyfriend after he was seen feverishly climbing into a restaurant's lobster tank. last danceHowever, it removes every human consideration from the equation of Eddie's life: every social bond, every personal goal, every minor bet that “the aliens and the government are trying to kill us.”
So when last dance tries to recreate the hilarious lobster tank moment: when the symbiote draws attention by making Eddie behave erratically in a Las Vegas casino, nearly killing him on a wild ride on the Venom-horse hybrid or throwing it away a plate full of home-cooked food in front of the people who delivered it to Eddie, in an act of unexpected kindness: there is no resonance. If Eddie Brock climbs into a lobster tank but there's no one who cares about him to hear him, does he make a sound? There's seemingly no end to the ways the symbiote can embarrass Eddie, but as long as Eddie isn't meaningfully connected to anyone in the movie, as long as he's lost everything except Venom, and no longer cares about Venom's esteem. others don't even worry about maintaining it. a normal life, that shame has no meaning.
At that point, you're simply putting Tom Hardy in a lobster tank for the sake of putting Tom Hardy in a lobster tank. And it turns out that that gets old pretty quickly.